Wednesday, November 30, 2016
... /////

Our Slovak-born finance minister, Andrej Babiš, is a billionaire whose net worth is some $3 billion. The U.S. president-elect is a billionaire whose net worth is about $3.7 billion. Both of them have had Czech partners. None of them is a real intellectual, both of them speak a kind of language that many ordinary people understand. Both of them have become rich in industries that are not exactly hi-tech and practical man's skills and common sense were their main weapons to do so. It's unavoidable that people tend to compare such people.

Hence, legal documents are being crafted which take me completely out of business operations. The Presidency is a far more important task!

Donald Trump has never been a member of the communist party or the communist secret police. His father Fred Trump wasn't a communist, either, and they haven't disinherited an uncle for his emigration to the West. Donald Trump hasn't written a tweet "I really don't support Trump despite the comparisons". Donald Trump isn't preparing a scheme that would allow him to monitor all payments in hotels and restaurants in real time starting from tomorrow.

(I wonder: Is some generous soul searching Google for words "order DDoS" and paying some $25 per hour for one hour of DDoS attack against fs.mfcr.cz and/or prod.eet.cz tomorrow? To make the evil scheme collapse and be abandoned? Hundreds of thousands of Czechs would really appreciate it. This paragraph is pure information, not my cooperation with a generous soul. I can't even think about any cooperation with anything like that. Also note that tomorrow, all restaurants in Czechia will be 10% more expensive in average.)

Graphite blocks are used to moderate reactions in nuclear reactors. If you study what's happening with them, you will find out that some of the ordinary carbon-12 in these blocks is turning into the radioactive carbon-14, especially on the surface of these blocks.

When you are sending the information by photons, one photon of frequency \(\omega\) must occupy the time at least \(\Delta t \sim 1/ \omega\) and transmits \(\O(1)\) nats (or bits) of information, e.g. a bit from the polarization of the photon. The energy of the photon is \(E=\hbar\omega\).

You might think that the number of bits per photon may be increased arbitrarily because the information may be carried e.g. in the precisely determined angular direction of the photon's motion. But Raphael argues that due to the unavoidable appearance of some quantum effects that are there despite the seemingly classical setup, the recipient of the information (whose name is Bob and who surrounds the source, Alice, by a big sphere) will actually not be able to extract much more information, and the total transmitted information can't be above \(E \cdot \Delta t / \hbar\), after all.

There have been various limits involving the information and entropy etc. Some of them seem to be universal in quantum mechanics, not just results in quantum gravity. This bound doesn't explicitly depend on Newton's constant \(G_N\) and even though the "cultural context" of the derivation seems like quantum gravity (just like some Bekenstein-related bounds), I think it's right to say that this is a non-gravitational result (if it is true).

I generally think that frequent referendums aren't a good way to organize societies – or at least nations such as mine – because I do think that detailed decisions should be made by selected people with special knowledge and skills and the median voter isn't one of them. That's why a competition between "potential experts" – politicians who fight against each other – which is judged by the median voter i.e. the representative democracy sounds like a more sophisticated scheme.

On the other hand, I am repeatedly impressed by the results of the referendums in Switzerland and the political maturity that they display. Almost one thousand years of referendums could have made the Swiss more sensible. One shouldn't denounce the possible explanation that the Swiss are simply better at this business – and what could be harmful to other nations may be beneficial for Switzerland.

Sunday, November 27, 2016
... /////

I used to consider The Washington Post as a daily that an average intelligent person could see as one of his information sources. But this picture was diminishing over the years and three days ago, it dropped hugely because of the article

In this most viewed article on WaPo's site on Friday, Craig Timberg teaches us that Donald Trump didn't win because of his personality, his program, his campaign strategy, preferences and values of a majority of the U.S. public, and their genuine dissatisfaction with the trends that America has been following in recent years. Instead, Hillary was partly if not mainly defeated by

Saturday, November 26, 2016
... /////

90 years is a blessed age to die and the Cuban Marxist leader was fortunate to live that long. Donald Trump just tweeted that Castro is dead. Almost all Cubans in Florida are celebrating. They're obviously right about the overall sign of the sentiment. He was a dictator that was responsible for many crippled lives and the erasure of some 90% of the Cuban GDP. But in some way, it doesn't sound "cool" to celebrate the death of this no longer dangerous "hip" character from the world history.

My country had a special relationship to Castro. Like other kids in the Soviet bloc, we were trained to recognize him as a hero. But the relationships were more special. For example, a very large percentage of the machinery used in Cuba was produced in Czechoslovakia. Among many other things, that included a car owned by Fidel, Tatra 603, typically a car of the Czechoslovak VIP communists. At some moment, he switched from Tatra and Soviet limousines to Mercedeses, however.

In 1968, Castro needed to improve his bad relationships with Moscow so he – unlike the Romanian, Yugoslav, Albanian, and Chinese comrades – endorsed the occupation of Czechoslovakia even though he didn't send any actual tanks. For this attitude, Cuba was allowed to export sugar or something like that.

Friday, November 25, 2016
... /////

I hope that the U.S. readers have enjoyed their Thanksgiving. Turkey seems like a natural topic these days.

I am not a fan of Daniel Landa and it seems right to classify his singing as out-of-tune (plus plain talk) but this well-known Czech song is titled "Thanksgiving" so it may get the right to look for fans outside Czechia. Music: Petr Hapka. Lyrics: Michal Horáček, Prague Café's presidential candidate.

Thursday, November 24, 2016
... /////

I have dedicated several blog posts to the attitude of Trump critics to the elections. The biased media coverage and polls (yesterday, during a public debate in the bank, I noticed how much the anti-Trump and similar self-evidently unjustified biases are widespread even among top bank analysts etc.) and the emotionally immature reactions by the leftists were given some room.

But there's another unsurprising dimension of the leftists' denial of their loss: attacks on the mathematics. While Scott Aaronson sent thousands of dollars to sponsor a recount in three states (WI, MI, PA; leftists' dealing with the taxpayer money is even more wasteful when they get in front of the steering wheel), Brian Greene included himself among the embarrassingly sore losers by questioning the U.S. democracy itself:

Clinton now leads popular vote by over 2,000,000. Electoral college hinged on 55,000 voters in 3 states. Curious flavor of democracy.

Well, that's a painful tweet, Brian, one that shows how sick political positions are considered normal in the Western universities.

I have tried to explain to him that "democracy" generally means "the participation of the most general public at power" but the detailed implementation of this general concept requires additional laws and the U.S. implementation involves the electoral votes. There's nothing non-democratic about this recipe: the "demos" still rules by picking a sensible number of electoral votes etc. During the presidential elections, the U.S. democracy is defined by the rules involving the electoral votes. The rules involving the electoral votes aren't a "curious" flavor of democracy but the "U.S." flavor of democracy, perhaps the world's most celebrated flavor of democracy.

Leftists are used to bending and twisting the rules whenever they can (also changing the rules during the game) – e.g. when they are selectively hiring women or people of color or other privileged groups at the U.S. universities or when they harass conservatives in the Academia – and they seem to be shocked that the same dirty tricks can't be easily done after the presidential elections.

Wednesday, November 23, 2016
... /////

But this one-month-old program about the "many worlds" is perhaps even more typical for what I have called the "pop science consensus" about the "interpretations" of quantum mechanics. You can find this garbage virtually everywhere, the creators of this garbage are copying it from each other. Most of the sentences in the video are either downright wrong or at least seriously misleading.

The weird rules of the subatomic world are very different from the laws of the large Universe.

When one is careful, this is just a correct sentence. But those people are never careful so it's obvious that they actually say lots of wrong things in between the lines.

One of them is, as we will see momentarily, that the laws of quantum mechanics do not apply in the large Universe. But they do. The laws of quantum mechanics apply everywhere in the Universe. It's just that in the context of large objects, the laws of classical physics also apply – albeit just approximately. But the laws of quantum mechanics never cease to apply. The relationship between classical and quantum theories is fully analogous to the relationship between non-relativistic and relativistic physics: in both cases, the older theory is a limit, either \(1/c\to 0\) or \(\hbar\to 0\) limit, of the newer theory. But the newer theory is always right, even at arbitrarily low speeds or for arbitrarily large objects.

The video – and equivalent films, books, newspaper articles etc. – contain a huge number of places that make it clear that their authors just don't understand that quantum mechanics applies everywhere in the Universe.

Also, the laws of quantum mechanics aren't really "weird". They're as non-weird as the world around us because they exactly agree with everything we know about the world around us.

Timing, wording, volatility are testimonies of the staggering incompetence

Today, eight days before the start of the online monitoring of all cash payments on the Czech territory by the ministry of finance (initially in the restaurant+hotel industry), the so-called EET, the main mastermind of the campaign, finance minister and billionaire Andrej Babiš, decided that the critics who said that EET would be particularly insane for e-shops were right, after all. He will propose "his" ingenious improvement of EET to the government – an exemption for e-shops. At least that's what he told a server named info.cz.

While the simple slogan defining EET is that it wants to online supervise all cash payments (officially to fight tax evasion but no intelligent person takes this justification seriously), for certain reasons, the plan has always been to monitor all payments except for regular bank transfers. That meant that all payments by credit/debit cards, PayPal etc. had to be supplemented with extra software that "reports" all these payments to the finance ministry in real time, receives two codes for the transaction, and demands that the consumer is given a receipt with these (very long) codes (FIK, BKP) calculated by the servers of the finance ministry.

Monday, November 21, 2016
... /////

"EM drive" is one of the names for the physically impossible gadgets that violate the third Newton's law. They're able to move without pushing anything else in the opposite direction which is why they can't exist.

People who don't understand basic physics are obsessed with such a gadget. The meme has been around for a long time. On this blog, I wrote about a wave of EM drive hype in early May 2015 and the NASA denouncement a week later.

The hype is back – dozens of writers bring us the gospel about the "proof" of a physics-defying, impossible gadget. It's been "peer-reviewed" so it must be true – and the letters "NASA" can be found on the first page of the paper.

First, a physics anniversary. Abdus Salam – see a TRF biography – died exactly 20 years ago, i.e. exactly 80 years after Franz Joseph I. He remains the only Muslim Nobel prize winner in physics (there are 2 in chemistry, 2 in literature, and 7 in peace). He's done a lot for the Pakistani physical sciences, his nation's pride, for the Standard Model but also co-fathered the Pati-Salam grand-non-unified models later. He's been a great scholar – even when it came to the English and Urdu literature. I think that he's also a proof that already in the mid 20th century, ingenious folks from poorer countries had an easy access to the top Western scholarly institutions.

Tonight, it will be exactly 100 years from the moment when our former ruler Franz Joseph I of Austria died in his Schönnbrunn Palace, Vienna, at the same place where he was born 86 years earlier, in 1830.

Around 9 pm, he asked his servants to wake him up at 3:30 am in the following morning, just like they did on that day. Because of so much work, he had no time to be ill, everyone believed him just days earlier. However, his fever surpassed 38 °C due to pneumonia, he died at 9:05 pm, and the imperial office had to report that "her majesty of death has touched Austria-Hungary with her firm hand" and an avalanche of obituaries was started. Check the sorrow of his loyal fans in Arkansas. ;-)

It's not bad to live for 86 years but the duration of his tenure is even more striking. He has been the emperor for 68 years – the equivalent of 17 four-year terms. Which U.S. president can boast about the same survival skills?

Friday, November 18, 2016
... /////

Elon Musk has done some good things but in recent years, he's been notorious for several Ponzi schemes, economically unwise big projects that have to be fed by subsidies and constantly added and exponentially growing new investments by increasingly brainwashed Musk investors who resemble a religious sect.

Tesla's PMD 85, a Czechoslovak answer to Sinclair ZX Spectrum in the mid 1980s. We did have those in Pilsen's Station of Young Technologists but PMD 85 was generally widespread in Slovak schools while Czech schools were full of IQ 151, a much less compact and overheated product. I've made programs for both.

One of his huge projects is Gigafactory #1 in Clark, Nevada. It's not completed yet but he is already planning to double the stakes. He has told DiCaprio that he wants to build 100 Gigafactories producing the same obsolete products marketed as a salvation of the Universe.

Back in the real world, he's already planning Gigafactory #2. And it should be in Europe. And an insider blog revealed something shocking for me yesterday:

According to the rules of naturalness in quantum field theory, the observed small Higgs mass is unlikely (because unless some special adjustments are made, scalar fields "love" to eat loops and become as fat as the cutoff scales) and therefore deserves an extra explanation, much like the even tinier magnitude of the cosmological constant (the energy density of the vacuum, the dark energy).

Henry Tye and Sam Wong claim that string theory dramatically revises (or can revise?) all this reasoning and makes (or can make?) a tiny cosmological constant along with very light scalars very likely as predictions of a randomly chosen type IIB compactification.

Thursday, November 17, 2016
... /////

Yesterday, Turkish forces captured two brave Czechs, Mr Miroslav Farkaš, a sniper (code name Serxwebun Botan), and Ms Markéta Všelichová (coded Zelane Botan), a smiling and attractive 24-year-old student of the Technology Department of the University of Agriculture, a practician in the combative health services, and a logistics expert who is also great in pattern recognition.

She can identify an attacker in a mob of refugees rather accurately and quickly. But yes, she can assemble and disassemble a submachine gun, too. ;-) And a website that could only be her ad but it could also be partly accurate (the web is surely partly satirical) claims that she has personally neutralized 100 ISIS animals – she calls members of Daesh "motherf*ckers" (more precisely, zmrdi) and ISIS has promised $1 million for anyone who stops her. During an interrogation in Turkey today, they said that they've been also trained by the German special forces and the French Foreign Legion but it's plausible that they were just making fun of the Turkish aßholes. (Maybe only Mr Farkas has undergone both trainings and this information is true.)

Wednesday, November 16, 2016
... /////

Why the transitions between democracy and totalitarianism in the West are abrupt

In recent weeks, we saw lots of left-wing activists who were apparently surprised if not shocked that majorities in 60% of states of the U.S. dared to vote for a candidate such as Donald Trump. Haven't the citizens seen the endorsements of Hillary by 99% of the widely circulated media outlets? Haven't they heard that Donald Trump was unfit for the job and politically incorrect and everyone who would support him would be labeled politically incorrect as well? Hasn't one year of massive pro-Hillary, anti-Trump blackmailing and brainwashing in almost all the U.S. media been enough to destroy almost all the dissent?

Well, it apparently wasn't enough. It wasn't enough for a simple reason. The pro-Hillary fanatics haven't succeeded in cancelling the elections and some technicalities that guarantee that people decide freely – e.g. the secrecy of the ballots. Because of the secrecy of the ballots and sacredness of the polling places, the voters are simply shielded from most of the illegitimate pressures. The secrecy of the ballots was introduced exactly in order to protect the system against aßholes like you, dear left-wing bullies. So by the months of self-evidently biased coverage, you've only wasted your time, money, and energy. You've only assured most people that you are not being honest. Years of lies are simply not enough to achieve certain political goals if other conditions aren't fulfilled.

If you could have harassed the people while they're picking the candidate in the polling places, it could have been different. You could have threatened them by boycotts and dismissals – things that you love to do in the rest of your life – and almost all the people would be afraid and they would pick Hillary. Leftists, you wanted a support for Hillary Clinton that would be about as clear as the results of the elections in the communist countries. But you have failed to do the difficult job that e.g. Stalin had to do to achieve it. What a surprise that you weren't as successful as the beloved Georgian comrade of yours – because you weren't as hard-working as he was.

Tuesday, November 15, 2016
... /////

Days ago, I couldn't tell you with any certainty who Steve Bannon was. Months ago, I couldn't even accurately tell you what "alt-right" meant. Nevertheless, certain people are very nervous about these things today and many of us were encouraged to learn that we're close to these names.

The alt-right key

Donald Trump picked Steve Bannon as the chief strategist of his administration. It's not shocking: Steve Bannon was the "CEO" of the Trump campaign. The campaign ended successfully which is why there is some reason to think that with Bannon's help, the first Trump's term could end successfully, too. I didn't know but in recent years, Bannon was also the boss of Breitbart.com, a server I was visiting increasingly frequently in the recent year or so. I had to look at his pictures and videos. Bannon looks like a heterosis of Robert Redford and some of the cowboys who occupied the federal land. Because such comments are often being spun in various ways, I must add a disclaimer: These descriptions are meant to be neutral appraisals of his appearance.

Much of the mainstream media have gone ballistic because they consider Steve Bannon politically incorrect. When someone is politically incorrect, the politically correct people immediately label him a homophobe, anti-LGBT, anti-Muslim, and indeed, an anti-Semite. The last label has been the most favorite label that the leftists have tried to attach to Bannon.

Dear kids,
uncle Vojtaano will tell you a fairy tale about Budulinek. Do you want it? So listen.

Once upon a time, there was a small baby who was naughty. And it was a bit moronic and was strangely rolling its eyes. They say it was missing something and had something in excess, too. And it wasn't pounds, the baby had few of those. It was lazy and it was saying that it will be. So the dad decided: You will be Budulinek ("will be lazy boy"), fart.

I will be lazy, I promise. I won't move my aß, I won't finish anything.

How he promised, he lived. He lived his life sloppily. He wasn't going outside much. He was just rolling around. He was a liar but didn't play the hidden aggression. His laziness prevailed. His dad was already afraid. So when he was sleeping, the dad took him where the wind was blowing. The dad slowly backed off the tree stand where he placed the non-stand (=naughty, hyperactive) boy. The guy woke up and said: Where the fuck I am? He didn't have a clue that the gallant deer was waiting for him.

The dark matter particle hasn't been directly detected on Earth although it could have been. So the probability that it is a WIMP – a weakly interacting massive particle – has decreased. It hasn't decreased "spectacularly" but it has arguably decreased "visibly", by a factor of two or something like that. Dark matter may be composed of LIGO-style black holes or axion-like ultralight scalars. Or it could refuse to exist – and some sort of MOND, perhaps with ideas analogous to Verlinde's recent speculations explaining it microscopically, could explain the phenomena mostly attributed to dark matter.

Monday, November 14, 2016
... /////

Eight years ago when Obama won the presidency for the first time, conservatives and supporters of Trump in 2016 could have been anxious because Obama was about as far from their ideas about the best president as Trump is far from the leftists' ideas today. But for some reasons, you won't find any hysterical blog post about Obama on this blog (and many other politically similar websites). You won't even find a single deeply frustrated sentence directly related to the 2008 or 2012 elections.

Some folks in the Democratic Party have reacted professionally. Hillary gave a great concession speech and Obama spoke about the peaceful transition of power and the need for Trump to succeed. Obama promised to help Trump in the transition period. This approach of Obama's must have been expected because Obama was treated in the same kind, professional way by George W. Bush 8 years ago. But the reaction of some left-wing activists in the bulk of the movement – or, equivalently, in its cesspool – was very different.

Many artists have reacted in brutal ways. Some of them vowed to move to Canada or Jupiter; I am not sure whether Canucks or Jovians are too excited about the prospect of such new fellow citizens. Paul Krugman reacted with several blog posts announcing the cosmic cataclysm. He had also predicted that the stock markets would never ever recover from the Trump victory again. In reality, they needed several hours and have grown by several percent since the elections – which makes sense given Trump's plans to reduce the corporate taxes, among other plans.

There are a few thousand stupid people attending somewhat violent anti-Trump rallies across America. They're burning flags and doing similar things. I won't talk about those because these animals are vastly overreported.

But I've read many articles about the university leftists' reactions and many of them are just absolutely unbelievable. If you haven't heard about them, you can make a search to see that many American universities are officially sponsoring "cry-ins" for the students who are psychologically ruined by Trump's victory. The students are collectively and publicly crying, they are being given puppies or coloring books for kids in the kindergarten, and lots of psychologists are serving them. This level of institutionalized psychological support trumps the support after 9/11 or any natural catastrophes. A very large fraction of exams have been postponed because of the elections, too. I was pleased to see that e.g. Larry Summers has refused to join this game.

Five independent Dutchmen have contacted me and told me that the Dutch media are obsessed with a new preprint by Erik Verlinde. Verlinde's fame among the inkspillers has already beaten Einstein's by an order of magnitude. (The echoes in the English-speaking media are so far a tiny fraction of the Dutch coverage.) I didn't know what to think about it but now I have spent a significant amount of time with the paper

Note that about 7 years ago, Erik Verlinde started the claim that gravity is an entropic force. Well, it can't be an entropic force because whenever entropic forces act, the entropy goes strictly up so the entropic forces are intrinsically irreversible – while a comet may be closer to the Sun, further from the Sun, closer to the Sun, and reverse things just fine. Also, it's not possible that the number of microstates attributed to a pair of objects depends on their distance: such an assumption would destroy interference in the gravitational field which has been experimentally demonstrated to exist using neutrons.

Friday, November 11, 2016
... /////

Note that the Czech National Bank has been artificially weakening the Czech crown (koruna) – much like its Swiss counterpart used to weaken the Swiss franc – since November 2013. It's been over three years now. One crown wasn't allowed to strengthen past CZK 27 per euro. For a year, the rate was about 27.5 but in the recent year, it was really close to 27.01 at all times.

Thursday, November 10, 2016
... /////

I've known for months that Myron Ebell was Donald Trump's choice for the EPA transitional team. I don't know Ebell in person – not even through e-mail – but he's been visible as a top man from the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a pro-free-market think tank.

You may look at the CEI videos on YouTube. If you expand the videos from the whole decade, you will find the name "Ebell" 21 times on the page – over twenty videos with him.

Wednesday, November 09, 2016
... /////

Donald Trump has been elected the 45th president of the United States of America. Congratulations!

He may have flaws but as far as I can say, he represents a much better direction for the future of America – and the West – than his competitor. His victory – 306 to 232 electoral votes or so (or 30-to-20 states) – is sound and the difference in the popular vote is just 0.2 percentage points in Hillary's favor. And as Ann Coulter has observed, if only people whose grandparents already lived in the U.S. were voting, Trump would have safely won all 50 states in a landslide.

A 20-minute victory speech with some fancy music. I think that the boy (Barron) Trump is rather annoyed by all this stuff. ;-) Later, Clinton's concession speech was relaxed, generous, professional, and maybe even more peaceful or friendly than Trump's victory speech. Obama's comments were also wise and a clear sign that the civil war has abruptly ended.

Only a few people say it here – like Klaus' aide Weigl – but the newly elected president is also the father of three half-Czech kids, a detail that could bring Czechia an exemption when Europe needs to be nuked. (Jokes aside: I do think that Trump is a better news for the world peace than Hillary would.)

Monday, November 07, 2016
... /////

One of the numerous unjustifiable and negative adjectives that Steven Weinberg attached to quantum mechanics in an interview was "ugly". It's ugly when there isn't an objective state of affairs at every moment, we were told. Equivalently, it's ugly when the world doesn't obey the laws of classical physics.

The aesthetic discussions are unavoidably subjective to some extent and people's differences cannot be completely settled. Nevertheless, I am confident that his view – and the view of many others who use murky excuses to sling mud on quantum mechanics and its brilliant fathers – is completely misguided. Here, I want to sketch a few dozens of reasons why quantum mechanics is prettier than the framework it has superseded, that of classical physics.

Sunday, November 06, 2016
... /////

He was an atmospheric scientist and, as Google Scholar indicates, a successful one. You may see that his well-known papers are about trace gases, methane, halogens, ozone, florides, bromides, and other compounds in the atmosphere. This diversity differs from the one-dimensional approach of the climate alarmists who want everyone to be obsessed with the greenhouse gases in general and CO2 in particular. With these diverse interests, it should be expected that the person is at most a lukewarmer when it comes to the climate hysteria. And while he has avoided any contradictions with the "prevailing scientific opinions" that sound technical enough, I think that Ralph Cicerone was a canonical lukewarmer. Well, a very senior climate skeptic has called Cicerone "a personal friend and a closet skeptic" today.

L.A. Times claims that he was an ex-chancellor of UC Irvine who studied "causes of climate change". But this is an extremely manipulative description. One may see that his most famous paper as well as 90% of his other well-known articles have nothing to do with man-made (and, usually, any other) climate change.

Saturday, November 05, 2016
... /////

Someone sent me a three-day-old video with almost 1 million views – Is This What Quantum Mechanics Looks Like? – which claims that some jumping silicone oil droplets on a wavy surface is what quantum mechanics fundamentally looks like. Over 99% of those who voted on this pseudoscientific video have upvoted it. Well, I surely didn't. It's despicable when this anti-science is sold as science.

But I have largely surrendered. It makes no sense to write new explanations why oil droplets are nothing like quantum mechanics because a few thousand people read my texts, only a fraction understands it, while millions of stupid people want to hear something else than the correct physical proofs of the truth. They want something that confirms their stupid prejudices and their fundamental misunderstandings of modern science.

And it's not just this basket of one million of morons who have watched the aforementioned bogus video. As they are getting senile, numerous star physicists are helping to amplify this idiocy as well. Sadly enough, Steven Weinberg has been increasingly fitting this description in recent years. John Preskill recalls that when he was a student of Weinberg's, quantum mechanics was fine for Weinberg. It's no longer so and in an interview for ScienceNews.org, Steven Weinberg demands an overhaul of quantum mechanics.

Friday, November 04, 2016
... /////

Hillary has done lots of illegal things with her e-devices and lied about most of those things – about the existence and number of her private servers and devices, the existence of classified e-mails on them, and many other things. The FBI – whose members said that an indictment was likely – also seems to claim a 99% certainty that the e-mails were hacked at least by five foreign powers.

Hillary and Eleanor are shaking their hands

Well, Barack Obama has lied about the servers as well. That may be a simple reason why he's been trying to bully the investigators in recent days. In spring, he told the TV viewers that he had learned about the secret Hillary servers from the press. In reality, he knew about them, he was sending and receiving lots of e-mail from/to them, and he was specifically informed whenever Hillary changed something about some of her e-mail addresses – six times in total.

While an ordinary person would probably be punished for this carelessness harshly, I still think that this borderline computer incompetence is something that could be sensibly forgiven because lots of people of Hillary's age just don't understand the computers or the need for the security and other things.

I am more interested in the beef and the beef seems much more troublesome. One problem is the corruption through the pay-to-play schemes. In particular, it turns out that the Clinton Foundation and ISIS are twin sisters, funded pretty much by identical sponsors that include the ruling families of Qatar and Saudi Arabia. The Clinton Foundation has received some $10-$25 million from the former and $1-$5 for the latter.

There were several other things that shocked me and made me understand why many FBI agents refer to Hillary as the Antichrist personified. Even though I can imagine that she will be a president (and pardoned by herself or Obama), I would personally vote for a "life in prison" if I were a jury member.

Thursday, November 03, 2016
... /////

First, off-topic: On Sunday, during a floorball match, I was encouraged to stand on my left foot improperly. A bone [left, base] got really broken, X-rays showed today. (That's not the first broken bone: I broke a rib during the same sport in 2009.)

This modern replacement for an orthopedic cast is thinner, more efficient, and also more resilient. So I can do something resembling walking without crutches. A disadvantage is the extra $30. Compassionate readers may help their handicapped humble correspondent via PayPal (thanks a lot to Umesh who did!).

The question is whether the human brains use some tricks of quantum computation. That could explain why we still seem smarter and more creative (or better in recognition and similar tasks) than computers with existing programs – even though the computers seem to have much more computing power. Most people in neuroscience say (and I tend to believe) that no such enhancement is needed to explain why our brains are pretty good. But a priori, it's possible that the intrinsically quantum operations with the quantum entanglement are relevant in the brain.

Gabriele Veneziano – the founder of the first "stringy" formula in the history, the Veneziano amplitude (unless you attribute the breakthrough to Leonhard Euler because it's the Euler Beta function) – sketches some history and basics of string theory as well as his favorite (and much more controversial) topic in the following decades, "before the big bang" cosmological models.

Woit seems less detached from reality than e.g. Terry Tao but the simple-mindedness, emptiness, and evil of his type of argumentation is still shocking.

In the first paragraph, he says that we don't live in normal times and the U.S. democracy is in a "disturbing state". To sketch how we wants to fix the "disturbing state", he announces that no discussion about his blog post is allowed because "Internet comment sections are a part of the problem". Right, a non-disturbing "democracy" is one in which people never talk and just mindlessly arrive to vote for Hillary-like candidates.

Tuesday, November 01, 2016
... /////

...it's not a new idea at all but it's described and analyzed by clear thinkers who know the standard state-of-the-art toolkit to determine the basic consequences...

Edward Witten is often painted as a "basically mathematician".

In fact, it's a description that you may have heard not only from the postmodern critics of science but perhaps even from your humble correspondent (especially whenever I found the number of homotopies and other things excessive for a given physical purpose in a paper he wrote). But I have always appreciated how much he understands both mathematics and physics – including physics that is very close to experiments. I was amazed by his knowledge of deeply technical, experiment-oriented particle physics phenomenology more than once.

I don't follow astro-ph abstracts on a daily basis so I had to learn about the paper from a big fan of Edward Witten who religiously digests every letter that Witten writes anywhere and who went to a vacation – and declared a hiatus in his blogging – because he needs to read the paper in detail. Well, this fan is also a big fan of supersymmetry and string theory whenever he's not drunk. His name is Tommaso Dorigo. Well, the Italian wine is good – I mean good enough for the Italians.

Finally, I had the opportunity to watch Climate Hustle, a documentary on the climate panic hosted by Marc Morano, the editor who runs ClimateDepot.com, the Drudge Report among the climate websites. It's great and I recommend at least some of you to order the DVD(s) or Blu-rays.

The documentary is witty, intelligent, ordered, balanced and original when it comes to the separation to the topics and selection of the talking heads who are interviewed. In particular, I think that Marc Morano is especially proud that a large part of his sources of wisdom are politically left-wing. (Well, I think that the climate hysteria has become such an important building block in the left-wing group think that most of the leftists could refuse to consider the climate realists as fellow left-wingers.) As the title indicates, the viewers are shown various card tricks, the shell game, and con men doing similar things.

I don't want to tell you any details because it could subtract from your joy when you watch the film because many of these things are funny, indeed.